This paper adds to a discussion initiated by Askew (2007) about two contrasting views of scaffolding; as a "tool for results" and a "tool-and-result". The wider study the article is drawn from took place in four primary classrooms with Pasifika students within a low socioeconomic setting. Two classroom episodes drawn from one…

How can science instruction engage students in 21st-century skills and inquiry-based learning, even when doing simple labs in the classroom? We collaborated with teachers in professional development workshops to transform "cookbook" activities into engaging laboratory experiences. We show how to change the common classroom activity of DNA…

An emerging group of leaders in Canadian education has attracted thousands of followers. They've made Twitter an extension of their lives, delivering twenty or more tweets a day that can include, for example, links to media articles, research, new ideas from education bloggers, or to their own, or simply a personal thought. At their best,…

Long-term impacts from a senior course in Environmental Studies were evaluated by a survey of program graduates (36 respondents, 50% response rate) who had participated in the course over an 8-year permiod. Each year, the Senior Seminar used a service-learning pedagogy with a different environmentally focused project ranging from web resource…

Fragmented, unfocused, and top down approaches to professional development are unrealistic, ineffective and do not promise anything significant to teachers and their contexts. This paper questions professional development for tertiary teachers in Pakistan. It does so from the perspectives of Pakistani tertiary teachers gained through a…

The present study investigated the effect of professional development (PD) on preschool teachers' conversational responsivity in the classroom, defined as teachers' use of strategies to promote children's participation in extended conversational exchanges (communication-facilitating strategies) and exposure to advanced linguistic models…

Conventional student-led evaluation is now an orthodox feature of the North American, UK and Australian higher education landscape. Increasingly, it is guiding major institutional decisions around educational quality, academic promotion and more recently institutional funding by government. Yet significant research around student-led evaluation…

Japanese lesson study--Jugyou kenkyuu--which is a cornerstone of Project DELTA (Developing Educators Learning to Teach Algebraically), adds a new twist: the teachers take turns publicly teaching the collaboratively planned lessons with their own students for the rest of the team to observe and then analyze, based on the students' learning. Lesson…

In this paper the authors suggest that teacher educators in higher education institutions (HEIs) in England are not fully convinced that teaching should be a Masters profession. The original engagement with Masters-level provision for student-teachers in England seems to have been founded on a technicality rather than a committed philosophical…

The Technology Enhanced, Research Based Instruction, Assessment, and Professional Development (TRIAD) was developed by Clements and Sarama (2009) in order to support low-income children's mathematical development in the preschool years through professional development for preschool teachers in mathematics. TRIAD includes a classroom component…

The Gilbert M. Grosvenor Center for Geographic Education, in partnership with the Agency for Instructional Technology, and the National Geographic Education Foundation have embarked on the production of a twenty-two-program, Web-based professional development series for teachers of geography, social studies, and environmental science, titled…

This article presents the results of a statewide survey that examined the perceptions and needs of elementary school principals in North Carolina who have prekindergarten classrooms on their campus. The survey examined principals' knowledge about early childhood education and their attitudes towards prekindergarten. Results suggest that few…

This pilot study aimed to address persistent gaps in the research regarding effective professional development models associated with reading comprehension pedagogy in content area classrooms (science). An appropriate instructional model was developed, ("Do-Read-Do") which attempts to embed the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies…

School geography in England has been characterised as a pendulum swinging between policies that emphasise curriculum and pedagogy alternately. In this paper, I illustrate the influence of these shifts on geography teacher's professional practice, by drawing on three "moments" from my experience as a student, teacher and teacher educator.…

For decades, when budgets dictated teacher cutbacks, no judgment of instructional skills was required. No evaluation of student results changed the outcome. No one consulted a summative evaluation. Schools just went to the personnel file, determined hiring dates, and the last one in lost her or his chair. In the new political landscape, lawmakers…